Queen's College/CUNY sociologist Harry G. Levine is perhaps best
known to drug reformers as coauthor (with Craig Reinarman) of
"Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice," a shattering
expose of fabrication and demonization amidst a drug crisis. But
Levine has long toiled in the field of drug policy research, and
this month his paper, "The Secret of Worldwide Drug Prohibition:
The Varieties and Uses of Drug Prohibition," was published in the
current issue of the Independent Review, the publication of the
Independent Institute, a libertarian leaning think tank.

In the paper, Levine argues that global prohibition exists not
only because nations want to protect the public health and safety,
but also because the perpetual war on drugs has so many other uses
for governments, politicians and various organizations. Levine's
article tackles an issue that drug reformers have wondered about
for years: If drug prohibition does not serve its stated purpose
-- making the world safe from drugs -- and it clearly does not,
why does it continue to exist? Does it serve some latent
function? Is it inertia? Is it a conspiracy?

Week Online: Can you briefly summarize for our readers the
argument you are making about the ubiquity of drug prohibition?

Harry Levine: Not easily, but I'll try. The article makes three
main points. First, every country in the world has drug
prohibition, but few people know this. Drug prohibition is a
global system held together by a series of UN treaties, the most
important being the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs.

Second, it is helpful to see drug prohibition as a continuum.
Heavily criminalized and punitive policies like the US crack
cocaine laws are at one end. The Netherlands' cannabis policy is
currently at the other end. Drug policy reform seeks to move laws
and policies away from criminalization and punishment and toward
decriminalization, tolerance and public health.

Third, the article offers a series of reasons why in the 20th
century drug prohibition was adopted by every country in the world
and supported by politicians from one end of the political
spectrum to the other. Let me just list the reasons I give for
why drug prohibition has spread so successfully around the world.

One, because of the influence and power of the US.

Two, governments of all stripes have found that the military and
police resources marshaled for drug prohibition can be used for
all sorts of purposes.

Three, politicians and the media find that drug demonization and
anti-drug crusades can be politically, rhetorically and even
economically useful for them.

Four, drug prohibition has benefited from the greater acceptance
of the use of coercive state power in the 20th Century.

Fifth, drug prohibition has gained legitimacy because it is a
project of the UN.

WOL: You have some interesting things to say about harm
reduction. You write that harm reduction tolerates drug
prohibition just as it tolerates drug use, and that it seeks to
reduce the harm of both. What are the political implications of
the harm reduction approach for ending prohibition?

Levine: Harm reduction is a very good thing. Harm reduction is
probably the most important public health movement to emerge in
the last twenty years or more years, and it is the first
international movement to challenge the more criminalized forms of
drug prohibition. Its effect, if not always its intent, is to
move drug policies toward the decriminalized, regulated end of the
spectrum. Some harm reductionists don't consider themselves drug
reformers, but in the course of pursuing improvements in public
health, harm reduction often requires changes in policy that
reduce the punitiveness of drug prohibition.

Interestingly, harm reduction's approach to drug prohibition is
the same as its approach to drug use. It seeks to reduce the
harmful effects of drug use without requiring that users be drug-
free; harm reduction also seeks to reduce the harmful effects of
drug prohibition without requiring that countries be prohibition-
free. Harm reduction offers a radically tolerant and pragmatic
approach to both drug use and drug prohibition: It assumes
neither are going away any time soon and suggests therefore that
reasonable and responsible people try to persuade both those who
use drugs, and those who use drug prohibition, to minimize the
harms that their activities produce.

WOL: Do you consider such phenomenon as drug courts or the
"treatment not jail" initiatives to fall within the realm of harm
reduction?

Levine: Coerced treatment, mandatory treatment, drug courts,
whatever you want to call this, is not harm reduction, at least as
I understand it. Drug courts and the like are a change within
criminalized drug prohibition; they are not a shift toward
decriminalized prohibition. I believe that most leaders of the
drug court movement, however well intentioned, are supporters of
criminalized drug prohibition -- they want drug users arrested and
threatened with criminal sanctions. This is important to
understand.

I personally think that offering voluntary drug treatment as part
of a range of services for people who want it is a very good
thing. But drug courts and coerced treatment still send to jail
the many people who fail in treatment, and especially in drug-free
treatment, to jail. As Lynn Zimmer has taught me, the only
effective way of reducing the number of people in jail and prison
on drug charges is by arresting fewer people for possessing and
using drugs. This is what they have been doing in Europe, and it
works.

Look at the case of Robert Downey, Jr. The man called the best
actor of his generation spent a year in jail because he flunked
drug tests. It started with a DWI, an unloaded gun and a small
quantity of heroin. If it were only drunk driving with a gun, he
would not have gone to jail. But Downey went to a drug court and
"treatment," flunked drug tests and was sent to prison. He didn't
give or sell drugs; he was a threat to nobody. He had friends,
family, doctors and more work than he could do, and yet he was
forced into jail and treatment simply for possessing small
quantities of drugs and for flunking drug tests. His case is
important because the same thing has happened to hundreds of
thousands of other young people -- mainly black and Latino -- who
nobody knows about.

WOL: One critic accused you of conjuring up a "secret cabal" that
creates and enforces drug prohibition. How do you respond to
suggestions that you are positing a sort of conspiracy theory?

Levine: I'm a sociologist and historian. I don't believe in
conspiracy theories, it's a silly point. If anyone knows of a
secret cabal, please have them contact me. I think that many
things that develop for one reason have all kinds of other
unintended effects. That's not a conspiracy theory.

WOL: You write about the "romantic view of the coercive state,"
which sounds like a libertarian argument for less state power.
Are you a libertarian, and if so what kind?

I am absolutely a civil libertarian. I am a member of the ACLU
and a graduate of Brandeis University, named after Supreme Court
Justice Louis Brandeis, who was the Supreme Court's first great
modern champion of civil liberties. He would be appalled by urine
drug tests and much else done in the name of the war on drugs.
Brandeis was also a defender of ordinary people against corporate
power as well as government power. He was called "the people's
lawyer," and he campaigned for consumer protection, women's rights
and against monopolistic business practices. He was also the
first lawyer and judge to passionately argue that the Constitution
gave the right to privacy.

Nowadays many people learn of the civil liberties movement from
The Libertarian Party and related organizations which, I believe,
mainly articulate what is called a "free-market" or "right-wing"
libertarian perspective. This movement has grown remarkably since
the 1970s, and they have done excellent work on many civil
liberties issues, including repeatedly pointing out the awfulness
and repressiveness of the war on drugs. William F. Buckley Jr.,
the economist Milton Friedman, the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz and
the Cato Institute are well known free-market or right-wing
libertarians. My article on "World-Wide Drug Prohibition" has
just come out in the Independent Review, which is certainly
sympathetic to free-market libertarian perspectives.

However, I myself come from a more left-wing libertarian tradition
that includes Justice Brandeis, the founders of the ACLU and much
of the early civil rights movement. Ira Glasser has called such
people "social justice libertarians," and I think it's a good
name. Both of my parents -- one Irish from the mid-west, the
other Jewish from New York -- were staunch civil libertarians, and
they just as strongly supported social and economic justice for
ordinary men, women and their families. On both sides of my
family, I am actually a third generation social justice
libertarian.

Social justice libertarians see the battle for civil liberties and
civil rights as linked with the struggles of working people, and
of the poor, exploited and discriminated against. The modern
civil liberties movement was created after World War I by social
justice or left-wing libertarians, and most of the 20th century
court cases over freedom of speech, press, civil rights, and more
were won by them.

I think nearly everyone who strongly supports drug policy reform,
decriminalization, and harm reduction policies is probably a
libertarian of some sort. They just may not know it yet. I
suspect that among the most active drug policy reformers, more
people are likely social-justice libertarians than free-market
libertarians. My sense is that right-wing libertarians have been
courageous, fierce, articulate critics of drug prohibition laws
and policies, but they have not thus far been strong supporters of
harm reduction programs or even of much drug decriminalization. I
think that harm reduction has been created and developed by people
who are essentially left libertarians. I also suspect that the
people working on the medical marijuana campaigns have been
disproportionately what I call social justice libertarians.

Unfortunately, there is no formal organization or movement of
social justice libertarians. Many of the people who do work for
the ACLU may themselves be social justice libertarians, but the
ACLU itself is not a think tank devoted to developing political
thought like Cato or the Independent Institute. Rather, the ACLU
is primarily the most important activist organization dedicated to
fighting against suppression of anybody's civil liberties,
including Nazis and Klu Klux Klanners.

I hope one consequence of the growing opposition to criminalized
drug prohibition will be a strengthened movement for civil
liberties in America and other countries. I also hope that we
left-wing libertarians will soon get our act together and openly
stand with right-wing libertarians -- as libertarians -- against
punitive drug prohibition, against the US drug war, and for the
civil liberties and civil rights of people who use the currently
illegal drugs.

WOL: You write that global drug prohibition is in crisis. Do you
foresee an end to the global prohibition regime anytime soon?

Levine: In the long run, the more punitive forms of drug
prohibition are doomed. And in the very long run, it seems to me
that the whole system of global prohibition is likewise doomed.
It is important to understand that the end of global drug
prohibition will formally happen when the Single Convention and
its related treaties are modified or repealed. These UN anti-drug
treaties are to the global prohibition system what the 18th
Amendment and the Volstead Act were to US alcohol Prohibition.
Once the 18th Amendment was repealed, states and some localities
were free to pursue their own alcohol control policies. Once the
Single Convention is modified or repealed, countries throughout
the world will be free to adopt their own drug policies --
including prohibition if they so desire.

Until recently European drug reformers had concluded that it was
politically too difficult to modify or repeal the Single
Convention. So policy makers and reformers have pursued their own
drug reforms, largely ignoring the treaties. But now there is
some discussion about changing the conventions, and that is a very
important development. The Drugs and Democracy Project at the
Transnational Institute in the Netherlands has put up some very
good materials about this on their
web site).

WOL: What is currently happening with cannabis prohibition?

Global cannabis prohibition is coming apart as we speak. The DEA
chief, Asa Hutchinson, says that decriminalization of cannabis in
Canada will make it harder to fight the drug war in the US, and he
is absolutely right. This has happened in the last 20 years in
Europe with the Netherlands. It also happened in the 1920s when
the US tried to maintain alcohol prohibition after Canada had
established legal production and sale. In both cases, many
visitors and even ordinary tourists saw a real world alternative
to ineffective prohibition policies. Many visitors also returned
home with the currently forbidden substance. The US drug czar and
DEA head appear to understand this, and so they are openly warning
Canada and openly worrying about what will happen. Nonetheless,
Canada is likely to make more steps toward decriminalization.

WOL: What else have you studied or written about besides drugs?

Levine: A number of things, especially alcohol prohibition, the
anti-alcohol or temperance movement, and the history of ideas
about alcohol. I also study the history and anthropology of food,
and I wrote a piece about why New York Jews love Chinese food and
eat so much of it. Recently I learned that students at Hong Kong
University read it.

I now think that drink, drugs and food are really all part of one
large topic. In the beginning there was only food. Then human
beings separated some plants as medicines. Finally, about 200
years ago, they created the category of intoxicants or drugs.
Drug demonization first happened in a large way in the early 1800s
with the creation of the anti-alcohol or temperance movement in
the US. Drug prohibition and the war on drugs are, in fact, the
direct continuation of the 19th century's war on alcohol. I think
that eventually more and more people will understand that.
Someday people will look back on drug prohibition and the crusade
for a drug-free America the way we today view alcohol prohibition
and the campaign for an alcohol-free society. Both were
repressive government systems in the service of an impossible and
historically bizarre goal.

I have a personal web site--http://www.hereinstead.com--where
I have put up some of my writings, along with jokes and various
other things. When this interview comes out, I'll put it up there
too.